Alright, I’m just going to cut to the chase because I hate waiting.  On Thursday we finally saw mom’s CT scan and she spoke to the nurse.  Her abdominal/pelvis CT revealed there was no evidence of metastatic cancer and no changes since her last scan in June.  On her chest CT there was a tiny pulmonary nodule but that has been there before and has not grown.  The results from her October 27th blood draw revealed her CA125* was down to 51 from 54 on October 16th.  She has been consistently taking her PARP inhibitor at a lower dose since October 26th and the side effects have begun to lessen.

It was a longggg two weeks waiting for these results.  The shock of finding out her CA125 was out of normal range and double knocked us on our butts and we sprung right back up.  We rallied, we went into cancer mode.  Everyone of us stepped up and assumed our roles to check in with one another and protect each other.  And because we’ve become old pros we did it better than we did the first time around.

We felt scared and sad but we still lived.  Mom painted at Lex’s and went shopping and decorated for Thanksgiving.  This is our life now.  She’s going to get test results that are scary and we are just learning to live while we wait.  So a big thank you to all of our friends and family for all the love and support!

So what is next…a blood draw Monday to see where the CA125 is at and then in 3 month she will have another CT scan and an appointment with her oncologist.

*CA125– I just wanted to give a little side information about the CA125 because I talk about it a lot in these posts. CA stands for Cancer Antigen. It’s a protein that is found in greater concentration in tumor cells but can also be found in other cells too.  That’s why when the CA125 is elevated they have to do other screening tests to determine the cause.  A normal CA125 is 0-35.  Everyone has their own version of normal.  We think mom’s normal might be 18 because that is the lowest value she has reached. The thing about the CA125 is the number doesn’t indicate the amount of cancer present.  Mom’s CA125 was about 8,000 when she was diagnosed with Stage 3C whereas there are other people at stage 3C that had a value of 150.  There have been patients with Stage 1 with a CA125 of 4,000.  It’s a helpful monitoring tool when it comes to recurrence because if it begins going up they can monitor you closely and hopefully catch it early. *